"That’s the road map for the next 10 years," Zuckerberg said at the time. "We are building the technology to give anyone the power to share anything they want with anyone else."

At a gathering of reporters last week at the social network's Silicon Valley headquarters, Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer opened up about how this 10-year plan is causing the company to shift gears — from building web and mobile apps, to expanding its horizons to hardware and other "stuff that'll be riskier over a long time horizon."

"We have to invest in stuff we don't know will work," Schroepfer says.

Putting aside decade-long initiatives like Oculus, the reason why even mega-popular apps like Messenger and WhatsApp are listed under the 5-year mark on Zuckerberg's chart is because that's how long the company anticipates before the products and the market align and translate into meaningful revenue.Facebook CTO Mike SchroepferFacebook

"We think it'll be a long time before we have a business model for those," Schroepfer says.

In fact, Schroepfer says, he kind of sees Messenger and WhatsApp as "in the middle" between the chat apps we like using today and the virtual reality future of tomorrow. From Facebook's perspective, both technologies enable people to connect with each other, and "VR is going to be the best form of that," he says.

But that's all years off. And between now and then, Schroepfer says, Facebook is taking advantage of its famous willingness to move fast and break things as it experiments and refines its approach to building the future.

But it also applies to the adjustments Facebook has had to make to its philosophy, particularly around research and development, as it expands beyond a social network and software company into new, uncharted territory.

Schroepfer jokes that, recently, a Facebook employee came to him to ask for an estimate for how much steel the company might need in the next two years for planning purposes. "I said, 'Do we really need to know this right now?' And they're like 'yup.'"

"The thing we are madly focused on is: VR is this powerful enabling technology, how do we get it out in the world in widescale form?" says Schroepfer. "It's too expensive, it's too hard to set up, there's not enough good content."

This even dovetails with the company's longterm plan for virtual reality: Zuckerberg has said that Facebook plans to build augmented reality glasses that project computer images in your field of view; Schroepfer says that this might be a key way you interact with artificially intelligent systems in the future.

'It's a good thing'

In general, though, Schroepfer says he sees all of Facebook's investments, in all of these categories, as working towards a social good.

"Every study I can find says that when you take a random person and connect them to the internet, it's a good thing," Schroepfer says.

And while it may be a long time before the whole world is wired up enough to really take advantage of cutting-edge stuff like Oculus virtual reality, Facebook's efforts around connectivity lay the groundwork to get everybody on the same page.

The Facebook Aquila drone, which will use lasers to beam internet access back to earth.Facebook

After all, Schroepfer says, if there's one thing everybody needs to do, it's communicate with other people.